Chamber of Commerce panels on blogs

Damn, DC humidity is about 101% and my glasses fogged up walking through the door. I’m participating at a panel today sponsored by IDI and Rightclick at the American Chamber of Commerce.

On the first panel, Cheryl Contee gave a strong overview of blog phenomena — Rathergate, London bombing. Then some interesting stuff from Peter Hirshberg , a VP at Technorati.com. He shows a slide with the total number of bloggers, now 12 million. But how many of those are active? We get a hint in the next slide, charting the number of blog posts per day. Apparently this peaked last week during the London bombings at 1.1 million per day. So, assuming that some bloggers make dozens of posts a day, the media guy makes 3 and many make zero… do we have 200,000 active bloggers… ie people who post at least seven times a week?

A month ago, when I asked Technorati’s Dave Sifry when they were going to commercialize their blog tracking service, the answer wasn’t clear. Listening to Hirshberg, it seems they are a lot closer. I heard a bunch of things from Pete Blackshaw yesterday suggesting that his Blogpulse is going to take a big leap ahead in this dimension also in coming weeks.

Mike Cornfield or Pew Internet and American life project: bloggers are “gatekeepers for the gatekeepers.” But you’ve to go manage your boss’s expectations. “Everything interconnects. When you are online, you are one click away from e-mail, one click away from an institutional web site, one click away from gather money, mobalizing people, one click away from organizing people. Because interconnectivity is so easy, it is very easy to think you can go viral…. Things don’t go viral as part of anyone’s strategic command. We are riding the waves just like everyone else. Don’t go chasing after the big viral thing that is going to change the world because your boss will know you are full of it… Btu you don’t need to go viral to create action. Even if we only sign up 100 people or get four journalists to go to our website, we’ve succeeded.”